The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway, the Lost Generation and the Modern World
Hemingway’s first novel, set in Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, is the archetypal novel of The Lost Generation, the group of artists and authors exiled together in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson. F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were its more famous residents and Hemingway their chief scribe. In it he depicts the listless parties and fiestas, drinking and loving and search for identity in an amoral world, where experience and enjoyment are the only pursuits worth having and direction and goals are forgotten in a society broken by war and death.
Our main character is Jake, an ex soldier turned journalist who has been injured during the conflict, an injury that has left him impotent, a condition touched on in moments but never specifically discussed. This is a world where the physical damage of half a decade of violence is brushed under a carpet of bright lights and social whirl:
‘Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.’
The lifestyle of decadence and hedonism is the only way the young survivors are able to deal with the new world that has been forced upon them. Life is short and at any time a similar event could be forced upon them, what have they go to but enjoy themselves while they can? In this respect all else is fleeting and unimportant. Jake’s impotence is a metaphor for this, the promise of a rounded, traditional life has been ripped away from him and so he lives not for the goals of family or future, but rather for the now and for who is there with him, just as all his contemporaries are. In Paris this has reached the point where it is the drinking and the parties that all that matters, superceding the individual and the self:
‘Did you hear that Henry. Mr Barnes intruded hi fiancée as Mademoiselle LeBlanc, and her name is actually Hebin.’
Reality is not important, identity is not important, it is disposable just like life itself when the future is uncertain. As long as the party id goof and the consumables of good quality, then the world is okay. Immediate experience is all that counts – a fine wine, a good joke and kiss by the Seine at night. As the Count, one of Jake’s acquired friends says to him with assurance:
‘You see Mr Barnes, it is only because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don’t you find it like that?’
While in the modern world we may strive to find more from life, the experiences of war have left Hemingway’s contemporaries feeling they have had their fill and are now able to appreciate was is good without conditions.
It is a romantic image, and a familiar notion from so much writing of the time – Fitzgerald and Gatsby most obviously springing to mind – and one still pertinent to a generation now, whose relative affluence and lack of meaning have left to similar levels of enforced revelry.
Much more than Fitzgerald is Hemingway’s consistent allusion to the violence that has been the catalyst for his character’s situation. The book as a whole begins with a description of the lamentable Robert Cohn as a boxer, who we then learn is now trying to become a writer, and continues to refer to this sport, alongside the bullfights of the Fiesta in Pamplona, throughout the novel.
‘Look how he knows to use his horns,’ I said. ‘He’s got a left and a right just like a boxer.’
It feels that while the war is over, the characters motivation for movement and action is still motivated entirely by the witnessing of violence as they seek to understand their lives. Jake has great understanding of the latter, perhaps showing that a war veteran he is more rounded and self-aware when it comes to these issues while the others still have an exuberant appreciation of the spectacle.
‘That’s an extraordinary business,’ Brett said.
‘The bulls were fine,’ Cohn said.
Cohn is less than impressed by the bloodthirstiness of it all, suggesting that he is still unable to cope with the pain and death that has affected them. Indeed, he is till holding onto some confrontational nature, while this is sanitised and removed among the rest. He is still fighting the acceptance of the nihilism of the world that Jake, Brett, Mike and Bill are comfortably able to deal with.
They key is though, that violence still causes the characters to react and understand it through their new existences. A steer is gored by a bull in full sight of all concerned, and Mike is able to joke about it afterwards:
‘I would have thought you’d love being a steer Robert.’
It’s the same as how Jake can laugh at his injury and Brett at her attitude towards the opposite sex. They know that they are being cruel and cold, but how else are they supposed to understand what is happening but if not through humour and mocking? And it is this journey that the Sun Also Rises is essentially about, how we come to understand what has put us in a situation which is entirely based on trying not to think about how we got there in the first place. Jake still thinks of himself in love with Brett. He starts the novel by hiring a prostitute. All the characters drink until they cannot see. Brett has an affair with a young matador, whose manly attributes are not questioned.
Cohn, the boxer turned writer, finds this through an act of violence. Mike through the reality of his wife-to-bes infidelity and Jake, by sobering up after the Fiesta.
‘I feel like hell,’ I said.
‘Drink that,’ said Bill. ‘Drink it slow.’
It was beginning to get dark. The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any better.
Bill sees the Fiesta as ‘wonderful nightmare,’ an apt oxymoronic reflection of the existences the characters are in. However, the most vivid understanding of this is presented through Brett, whose journey if understanding permeates the whole book. She is Jake’s motivation for continuing his illusory existence and he hers, for still believing in an illusion of love that no longer exists in her soul, and it is at the climax of the fiesta that she bares this out.
‘I’m a goner’ she confesses. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.
‘I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.’
‘I can’t just stay tight all the time.’
Brett has understood that she is acting out of a need for lust and constant satisfaction, and this is all that ‘love’ has now become for her. She expunges this is Hemingway’s trademark laconic style. It is only when we can express ourselves in simple, succinct terms that we can truly understand who we are.
Now the party is over, each party is developing this realisation, rather than living for the party itself, not the beautiful, talented individual they may have thought, and not the world of bright lights are long gulps of Pernod. Reality is more akin to the fishing trip that Jake and Bill take midway through the novel, a lucid intervals amongst the Paris parties and Pamplona fiesta, where the world is soft and tactile, the violence very much of the natural order, where only the fish are in danger, and the alcohol an irrelevant addition. It is only through the chaos of the human condition that we misunderstand the simplicity of the world and delude ourselves it is anything more.
I wonder if the modern world has learned anything from this?
Our main character is Jake, an ex soldier turned journalist who has been injured during the conflict, an injury that has left him impotent, a condition touched on in moments but never specifically discussed. This is a world where the physical damage of half a decade of violence is brushed under a carpet of bright lights and social whirl:
‘Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.’
The lifestyle of decadence and hedonism is the only way the young survivors are able to deal with the new world that has been forced upon them. Life is short and at any time a similar event could be forced upon them, what have they go to but enjoy themselves while they can? In this respect all else is fleeting and unimportant. Jake’s impotence is a metaphor for this, the promise of a rounded, traditional life has been ripped away from him and so he lives not for the goals of family or future, but rather for the now and for who is there with him, just as all his contemporaries are. In Paris this has reached the point where it is the drinking and the parties that all that matters, superceding the individual and the self:
‘Did you hear that Henry. Mr Barnes intruded hi fiancée as Mademoiselle LeBlanc, and her name is actually Hebin.’
Reality is not important, identity is not important, it is disposable just like life itself when the future is uncertain. As long as the party id goof and the consumables of good quality, then the world is okay. Immediate experience is all that counts – a fine wine, a good joke and kiss by the Seine at night. As the Count, one of Jake’s acquired friends says to him with assurance:
‘You see Mr Barnes, it is only because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don’t you find it like that?’
While in the modern world we may strive to find more from life, the experiences of war have left Hemingway’s contemporaries feeling they have had their fill and are now able to appreciate was is good without conditions.
It is a romantic image, and a familiar notion from so much writing of the time – Fitzgerald and Gatsby most obviously springing to mind – and one still pertinent to a generation now, whose relative affluence and lack of meaning have left to similar levels of enforced revelry.
Much more than Fitzgerald is Hemingway’s consistent allusion to the violence that has been the catalyst for his character’s situation. The book as a whole begins with a description of the lamentable Robert Cohn as a boxer, who we then learn is now trying to become a writer, and continues to refer to this sport, alongside the bullfights of the Fiesta in Pamplona, throughout the novel.
‘Look how he knows to use his horns,’ I said. ‘He’s got a left and a right just like a boxer.’
It feels that while the war is over, the characters motivation for movement and action is still motivated entirely by the witnessing of violence as they seek to understand their lives. Jake has great understanding of the latter, perhaps showing that a war veteran he is more rounded and self-aware when it comes to these issues while the others still have an exuberant appreciation of the spectacle.
‘That’s an extraordinary business,’ Brett said.
‘The bulls were fine,’ Cohn said.
Cohn is less than impressed by the bloodthirstiness of it all, suggesting that he is still unable to cope with the pain and death that has affected them. Indeed, he is till holding onto some confrontational nature, while this is sanitised and removed among the rest. He is still fighting the acceptance of the nihilism of the world that Jake, Brett, Mike and Bill are comfortably able to deal with.
They key is though, that violence still causes the characters to react and understand it through their new existences. A steer is gored by a bull in full sight of all concerned, and Mike is able to joke about it afterwards:
‘I would have thought you’d love being a steer Robert.’
It’s the same as how Jake can laugh at his injury and Brett at her attitude towards the opposite sex. They know that they are being cruel and cold, but how else are they supposed to understand what is happening but if not through humour and mocking? And it is this journey that the Sun Also Rises is essentially about, how we come to understand what has put us in a situation which is entirely based on trying not to think about how we got there in the first place. Jake still thinks of himself in love with Brett. He starts the novel by hiring a prostitute. All the characters drink until they cannot see. Brett has an affair with a young matador, whose manly attributes are not questioned.
Cohn, the boxer turned writer, finds this through an act of violence. Mike through the reality of his wife-to-bes infidelity and Jake, by sobering up after the Fiesta.
‘I feel like hell,’ I said.
‘Drink that,’ said Bill. ‘Drink it slow.’
It was beginning to get dark. The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any better.
Bill sees the Fiesta as ‘wonderful nightmare,’ an apt oxymoronic reflection of the existences the characters are in. However, the most vivid understanding of this is presented through Brett, whose journey if understanding permeates the whole book. She is Jake’s motivation for continuing his illusory existence and he hers, for still believing in an illusion of love that no longer exists in her soul, and it is at the climax of the fiesta that she bares this out.
‘I’m a goner’ she confesses. ‘I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.
‘I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.’
‘I can’t just stay tight all the time.’
Brett has understood that she is acting out of a need for lust and constant satisfaction, and this is all that ‘love’ has now become for her. She expunges this is Hemingway’s trademark laconic style. It is only when we can express ourselves in simple, succinct terms that we can truly understand who we are.
Now the party is over, each party is developing this realisation, rather than living for the party itself, not the beautiful, talented individual they may have thought, and not the world of bright lights are long gulps of Pernod. Reality is more akin to the fishing trip that Jake and Bill take midway through the novel, a lucid intervals amongst the Paris parties and Pamplona fiesta, where the world is soft and tactile, the violence very much of the natural order, where only the fish are in danger, and the alcohol an irrelevant addition. It is only through the chaos of the human condition that we misunderstand the simplicity of the world and delude ourselves it is anything more.
I wonder if the modern world has learned anything from this?
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